Leading from the middle is a major challenge, which involves a significant scope of managing up and down. In Departments, subjects, and curriculum areas, there is a lot of room for success. The autonomy and specificity of these project areas leaves plenty of room for a Middle Leader to have impact, and to make a difference. 

But can the same be said for leadership of whole school initiatives or cultural shifts? What are the potential areas of success, failure and learning for middle leadership in trying to do something bigger? These are some early reflections on some work from this academic year, and what I have learned and struggled with.

Theory: Law of Diffusion of Innovation

The law of diffusion of innovation is a concept that I first came across with Simon Sinek’s TED talk on “Starting with Why”. Although the language and terminology focuses on customers and business worlds, the applicability to any change management is, to my mind, helpful and immediately obvious.

Within a school context, “innovation” here could be anything, but the potential role for innovation and the early adopters among Middle Leaders is clear and exciting. Of course, this innovation could come from anywhere: software, external consultant/INSET, any of our brilliant teachers, or Senior Leadership – it doesn’t matter. It’s the lateral hire, the person who comes in with new reading, a new syllabus, a fresh perspective, and gets a group of people interested, engaged and excited. It’s the membership, the trial run, the idea that sparks a wave of “oh, that’s cool: we should try that”.

However, my question here is how does that change diffuse further? I think there needs to be some early adopters amongst the Middle and Senior Leadership – else the idea isn’t necessarily going to spread as effectively as possible.

The model describes a ‘chasm’ – a point where growth can stall and fail to spread in the way that you want it to. The early innovation is clear: the principles sound, and the process is beginning: but unless you can cross that chasm to get an early majority and late majority to adopt the new way of working, the innovation goes nowhere.

Example 1: Adoption of a Virtual Learning Environment

When I first joined my current school, there was no Virtual Learning Environment in place. They had tried Moodle, and not enjoyed the experience, and it was clear that something needed to come in. However, with a significant personnel change and a new Head, there was clearly a time and opportunity for a change in platform. As part of my interview process, and previous role, I’d had some experience in rolling out virtual platforms, and I was invited to offer some thoughts to SLT. This turned in to a commercial proposal, which was externally submitted, and SLT eventually chose a platform to adopt. With limited experience elsewhere in the building, I was asked to help launch the product and train up the staff. We now run this as a standard procedure: it’s just “the way the school works” and is part of our expectations.

As a middle leader, I was able to effect significant whole school change. Sort of. Except, it wasn’t really me. There were significant components of this conversation that made it much easier to cross the chasm, and to get the early/late majority on board.

• There was no alternative option. It wasn’t a case of debating and convincing in a crowded market place, where we had lots of different software to choose from. A decision had been made.
• There was no prior experience. People weren’t afraid to change away from something that they had previously been using, or disappointed to lose something they had invested a significant amount of time/resource in to: there was an open door to push against.
• This decision had been taken by Senior Leadership, and it was something that was “to be done” across the school. It wasn’t something that people could opt to buy in to, or choose alternatives: it was expected that we’d use this system, and that it was embedded in student and staff routines.

In truth, then, there wasn’t really a chasm to cross as a middle leader. I might have been part of the innovation, but the mechanism for diffusing ideas was put in place by senior leadership. What I was able to add was ‘window dressing’ – how to persuade people that this directed idea was i) worth their time and ii) going to benefit their teaching and practice. I made it easier for people to feel like they were making a decision, but it wasn’t significant in implementing the innovative change.

How would this compare to a different example?

Example 2: Building a Teaching and Learning Culture

As a school, we have slowly been turning around our teaching and learning culture amongst staff. A number of early adopters are diffused among the Middle Leadership – we have some active on Twitter, some active in subject and mentoring networks, some active in the Chartered College, and even the occasional blogger. However, at the moment, this culture isn’t widely diffused across the institution. We don’t have the external push factors of OFSTED to drive us, so in many cases, this appears to be a fairer and more reflective test of the law of diffusion.

Here, we seem to have hit the chasm a bit harder. While there are a small cluster of engaged and early innovators, as you’d expect, and one or two Departments where an early innovator pushes out a bit of practice, there is still a wider understanding and challenge of diffusion across the whole school. We have managed to get some ideas out there: and even launched our own Teach Meet, but momentum has not yet built to a point where the adaptation and thinking is becoming widespread.

For this, the factors include:

• A very supportive Head, who has done a lot of work to support a Staff Development Working Group, and championed some initiatives forward. However, SLT are (quite rightly, I think!) not imposing this on the staff as a directive: if people choose to engage, then there is support available.
• A range of options in the community, where the benefits of a more research-engaged approach are not immediately clear. We have to compete against existing pedagogy, ideas and resources and the “we’ve always done it that way” mindset.
• No mandated/directed engagement: we have to convince people of our ideas, and persuade them to engage with it. We can’t force the issue.
• A sense of “threat” to workload and time commitments: are we just asking people to do too much, and more? We are a fairly small school, and time is not one of our biggest assets: there is a clear pressure on workload, and this might be a step too far?

Without an SLT role explicitly focused on Teaching and Learning, there isn’t a major external driver to this to “make it happen” in the school. It is about marketing, about persuasion, and about genuine market forces – convincing people that it’s worth doing, showing them why, and helping them to believe what we believe.

It’s an ongoing campaign, and I hope that it will continue to be successful and build momentum. But I’d be fascinated to hear different perspectives on it: is middle leadership something that has limits?

How can you cross the chasm of research and engagement in a school culture? Do you need to have Senior Leadership onboard to make initiatives in schools successful?

What have you done that’s successful? How have you crossed the chasm in your school environment, and what can I read or learn from that?

The key to bringing Geography alive is to help students to understand the real world around them. For many of us, this goal is why we do fieldwork – the ability to take students in to a landscape, environment or challenging human problem, and bring them out of it with more experience, understanding and greater sense of place.

Nowhere is this more important than in understanding our atmosphere. With the climate change debate regularly at the forefront of global issues, and natural hazards becoming more challenging to predict and manage, knowing how the atmosphere works is a vital part of a Geography curriculum.

And yet our teaching of weather and climate is varied. At the microscale, the Royal Meteorological Society’s Met Link website provides excellent resources for understanding process, or for conducting micro-scale fieldwork around the school environment. At the “extreme event” scale, our case study knowledge is superb: located resource material has been produced, with DVDs, links and real examples of what has happened. Both ends of this teaching experience offer opportunities to really engage students, and draw them in to the small or large scale dramas of the atmosphere.

However, our understanding of the day to day working of the atmosphere is often more theoretical; reverting to principles of atmospheric physics. The focus of student learning is to understand the processes that drive the atmosphere, but we tend not to have many opportunities for them to apply this knowledge.

This post is heavily based on an article I wrote for Teaching Geography in 2016, but with added information on how I use it to teach specific aspects of weather and climate, and how we can teach air masses, the jet stream, or just plain old awe and wonder in the classroom/Open Day.

I am always open to discussions and ideas about this – and eternally grateful to Cameron Beccario (@cambecc) who is the original author of the Earth website. If ever it disappears, then a huge part of my teaching world will be sadder!

EARTH.NULLSCHOOL.NET – What is it?

To give students the chance to do real learning and ‘fieldwork’ would require access to a ‘simulated’ Earth – where we can interact with explore live data, and demonstrate to students how the various aspects of the atmospheric and ocean physics correlate. For a long time, this was the domain of expert meteorologists only, with climate models.

Then, in 2014, a visualisation was made available by Cameron Beccario (@cambecc) on the internet which offered this ability on an open source basis. Hosted on a free public website (http://earth.nullschool.net), the visualisation combines a range of data feeds with an open-source model that replicates the flexibility of a Google Earth-style interface. The model is a visualisation of the computer forecasts, and updates every three hours, with further details of data sources on the website.

At the simplest level, the Earth model allows classroom teachers to call up anywhere on the planet and present a visualisation of the live feed conditions. If there is a tropical storm somewhere on the globe, your students can see it happening in front of them, and get a sense of the scale of what they will see on the news. If there’s a significant atmospheric event of another kind (look at Australia’s bush fires of December 2019-Jan 2020 as an example), you can see lots of information and ideas about what’s going on. My students know how obsessed I am with this site – and it’s often the first thing on the board that I show them when they come in: let’s look at what’s going on in the world right now!

Basics: How do you use it?

Finding the resource

The website is available for free on any device: http://earth.nullschool.net

That’s it.

Finding a place:

Click and drag, like you would on Google Earth. Usually, your mouse scroll wheel will zoom in and out – touch screen devices can be operated as normal.

Changing the display mode:

If you want to do anything more complex, you need to open up the menu. This is accessed by pressing the “Earth” button in the bottom left of your screen.

You can change the projection of the map, you can change the data that you are displaying – and be quite specific about how you want it shown, or what level, and you can change the time frame that you want to display.

Changing the projection:

The default setting for the projection is in “O” (orthographic” mode), which shows the globe as a sphere. But if you want to show other ideas, you can play with the projection. Most commonly, I use:

E – Equirectangular – to show a “world map” style projection. Brilliant for seeing whole globe patterns, comparing latitudes, or looking at big oceans trends (e.g. ENSO)

P – Patterson – similar to the world map view, just slightly different projection.

There are a lot of other variants, but I tend not to use them too much. Stereographic mode allows you to put anywhere at the centre of your view, and the other modes allow for very specific analysis to be done. Play with them – they can be brilliant for showing the flaws with the globe modelling in Year 7 map skills, if nothing else!

Display controls

You can move forward and backward through time (or pick a specific date in history) if you wish. Use the “Now” button to go to the immediate display, and scroll in 3hr or 24hr segments using the arrow keys. If you want to pick a specific date, then open up the calendar menu.

“Grid” turns on the model grid, and “>” toggles the animations on/off. HD generates a high-definition mode – ideal for leaving as a background display at Open Evenings and similar.

Developing: How do you play with it?

What makes the Earth model particularly useful for this kind of understanding is the interactive layers. Clicking on the “earth” in the left corner brings up a menu, enabling the user to control what they see in the atmosphere.  You can choose whether to explore atmosphere or ocean, what and how to animate, and how to scan through that in time and spaces. The menu gives you scope to pick different variables from a list that includes wind, temperature, relative humidity, through to cloud water and sea level pressure. Hovering over the menu list gives you a detail of what it is.

Some ideas:

To see the…	Have a look at…
Range of different temperatures across the planet	Mode – Atmosphere Height – SFC Overlay – Temp
Proof of the environmental lapse rate	Mode – Atmosphere Overlay – Temp Height – change through decreasing, showing what the temperature is at each height
Where it’s raining currently	Mode – Atmosphere Overlay – 3HPA (three hourly precipitation accumulation) You can look at TPW – total precipitable water or TCW – total cloud water – if you want something that looks a bit more like the cloud patterns, rather than rainfall specifically.
Distribution of wind patterns	Mode – Atmosphere Height – SFC Overlay – Wind
Link to air masses and the ‘jet stream’	Mode – Atmosphere Height – 250 hPa (technically a pressure rather than a height – but great nonetheless!)
Rossby waves/jet stream meandering	If you want to teach “Rossby waves” or any complex atmospheric variable – showing meandering or “flow” in the atmosphere, then do this on a big projection like the Equirectangular one!
Sea surface temperatures	Mode – Ocean Overlay – SST
Sea surface temperature changes (for example, to model El Nino Southern Oscillation) or unusual conditions (e.g. tropical storms)	Mode – Ocean Overlay – SSTA
Influence of different continents and temperatures	Mode – Ocean Animate – Currents
Carbon emissions/sulphur emissions	Turn the mode to “Chem” Look at CO2SC for Carbon surface concentrations or SO2 SM for sulphur particles
Particle pollution Aeolian transport of dust particles/loess	Mode – Particulates Try “DUex” for dust – great to see the desert kicking off the Sahara out to the Amazon! PM1-10 shows particle matter of different pollution sizes – easy to see the lower quality areas!
Forecast of the aurora borealis	Mode – Space Wonderful!

Example: How I teach … the jet stream

In the atmosphere, the option of atmospheric pressure layers enables you to fly through the troposphere and stratosphere, and explore the interaction of vorticity in the mid-planetary boundary layers (700hPa and 500hPa), while the higher altitudes (250hPa) correspond to the jetstream and stratospheric winds respectively. For students – particularly at the higher levels – the chance to identify how the different cells, air masses and winds interact with each other is unparalleled.

The application of knowledge enables simple diagnostics to be carried out within lessons on any given day and climatic features. Starting with a simple wind pattern for a location, students can be prompted to work backwards and identify the key climate features. What is the wind direction? What air masses would you expect to see? What conditions would you expect? What jet stream position would you anticipate this bringing? Each of these queries and student predictions can be tested by altering the variable – were they right? What was their reasoning?

More advanced students may be challenged by a forecast scenario. For a given pattern of the jet stream – either live, or archived – what weather would you want to see? Students are then expected to think through the conditions – working out how they would arrange the fronts, the wind patterns and what air masses would be involved. If you are ambitious enough, you could ask your students to create a hand drawn synoptic chart for the area!

Development: Integrating Live Data Sources

Increasingly, big data providers are making semi-live feeds of their data and analysis available online for free-to-access public consumption. The challenge for teachers was to know how and where to access these fantastic – but quite niche – resources. A solution to this challenge has been provided by Met Check (http://www.metcheck.com/UK/) – an evolution of a UK-based website that originally started in 1998 as a provider of 30-day forecasts for hobby groups. Now expanded, the website provides a single site gateway to access many of the highest quality data sources that show current weather for the UK.

Accessed via drop down menus, the site enables users to display animated images of a large range of weather options – from the standard Met Office synoptic chart and temperature distribution, through to satellite imagery and three-dimensional visualisation of rainfall patterns. There are still options aimed at specific hobbies – you may want to use these to theme your lesson, or link it to e.g. numeracy targets and wider cross-curricular projects and aims. Often, embedding weather components in to other lessons is a practical way to familiarise students with the idea of weather information as a source. Rather than learning from a textbook diagram, students can instead analyse and interpret live weather conditions – identifying the odd one out from a sequence of images of a similar feature, or producing a synoptic chart from the satellite imagery and conditions shown.

Example: How I teach … air masses

Perhaps more interesting is the extent to which we can start to utilise these sources as diagnostic tools. Take the classic lesson on the ‘air masses of the UK’ as an example. Ordinarily, we might draw a diagram showing the different air masses, and explain the expected weather conditions for each. However, using the Air Mass Satellite images (http://www.metcheck.com/UK/airmass.asp), we can see live images which have had an artificial colour applied to show what air mass they are. This RGB composite image can be paused, advanced and rewound – showing the development of conditions and the interaction at.

Taking this further, the map of the jet stream and forecast can be used to explain how this boundary exists – and what it might look like in the future. Students can now be actively involved in analysing, interpreting and predicting the systems – using higher order thinking to take apart and apply what they know to make competent predictions. Using the data, rather than simply observing it, is the first stage to a more engaging pedagogy of weather and climate processes.

Now we can connect this up to causes – switching to the jet stream from Earth Simulator, and looking to explain it. Again – what is the jet stream, and how does that drag air around? What does that mean? What can we learn from it? Roll it forward – what is the forecast for the jet stream, and how does that generate the potential for a weather forecast? Predict the weather based on the air masses – can you compare it to e.g. BBC Weather – and get it right?

Clearly, this kind of resource can be combined with the resources described previously: being able to visualise the wind patterns of a synoptic chart, or get a sense of how the atmospheric patterns and air masses of the satellite feed can generate a wind pattern. Students are able to see how the synoptic chart generates a frontal system, visible on satellite, and with RGB composite airmasses to explain how the depression is created. The Earth simulator shows how this wind appears at surface level, and higher in the atmosphere, demonstrating the role of the vorticity and jet stream in creating and exacerbating this particular event.

Implications:

The weather is a wonderfully dynamic and unpredictable system. Although the fundamentals of atmospheric physics are well understood, and we can effectively teach, represent and model them, there is no reason to limit our teaching to this approach alone. To really engage our students in higher order thinking about the weather, we need to be showing them how it really works – and utilising as many data sets and representations as possible. Use lots of websites, and keep challenging your students to look to the skies and explain what they see!

Teaching is a profession where, often, what you do outside of your classroom role is potentially more powerful and impactful than the lessons you teach in your subject. For many teachers, too, it’s one of the cherished parts of the job – the thing that makes it feel vocational, perhaps even the reason you got in to teaching in the first place. Often, they are the highlights of a term, but can also be the thing that puts you under the most pressure: they are the bits of your role that have to be squeezed around the fixed lessons and commitments, and can sometimes be the things you are least trained for.

For me, this is encapsulated in the autumn term by the work that goes in to preparing students for university applications. While this sounds reasonable, and is often a job delegated to form tutors and perhaps Sixth Form leaders, it’s actually a really complex mixture of many of the following components:

• Helping students to organise and support visits, open days, and research programmes. 
• Helping students to identify course choices, and research and understand the components of what they might want to study. 
• Helping students to identify where they might want to study. Supporting ambition, tempering over-ambition, helping them get to the right level for them. 
• Navigating the difficult discussions and decisions where students cannot make up their minds, and need guidance on the relative merits of deferred entry, or applying a year later, sandwich degrees, gap years, have too broad a choice approach, or cannot quite reconcile all of these things with expectations.
• Supporting and managing the process of predicted grades, and how they are issued, debated and evidenced if appropriate for your school environment. 
• Supporting students to complete the physical application form, and understanding all of the small components that can be tripping them up. For example, fee codes, or qualifications to solve and how all of that needs to be exact and perfect!
• Supporting students to write personal statements, particularly when they are so diverse and may include difficult narratives. 
• Supporting tutors and teachers to write meaningful and suitable subject and student references, which are tailored to a complex choice that might not have been made yet.
• Supporting tutors to write effective and meaningful references which combine the subject references to give the best story of the candidate. 
• Being able to manage the process of pre interview assessments for early applicants, including the myriad preparations for different testing requirements across subjects at Oxford and Cambridge, or Art Foundation courses with portfolios and requirements. 
• Supporting students to prepare for interviews, including arranging practice interviews and trying to get subject support and specialists in place. 
• Supporting Heads of Department in helping these students, especially in subjects where the staff might not have the relevant Oxbridge experience themselves to conduct and prepare mock interviews. 
• Being able to give consistently good and fair advice which doesn’t rely on your own perceptions, bias or interpretation. 
• Navigating potentially difficult or tense conversations with parents and students where there is uncertainty or conflict over those things. 
• Navigating the support and coaching of colleagues for whom this is a new experience, whether they are form tutors, subject teachers, or Heads of Department. 

This isn’t an exhaustive list, and I’m sure that there are plenty of things that I have forgotten. Many of these things are a joy and a privilege to do, and I have been very lucky to work with some excellent people in these roles. 

What I find interesting, though, when I reflect on it, is that I have never really had anything vaguely approaching training on almost any of it. A previous Head of Sixth Form has helped coach on how to write some references, a few years ago, but I don’t think that I have ever seen many courses, INSET or options to get better at it. 

That is quite worrying, I think. This massively important component of Sixth Form teaching, and perhaps a major aspiration for students and schools, seems to be precariously balanced on a limited knowledge and experience base. Now, undoubtedly, there are excellent people out there, and I hope that my own practice in this has been informed by my work, research and thinking, and I’d hope that the outcomes I help to generate are right for my students. 

But when we pay lots of attention to the building blocks, and not so much attention to the gaps in between, there are risks. I’d like to see much more advice and support given, on a wider basis, to UCAS advisers and schools, and I think there is a big role for bigger organisations to play in doing this. Many universities quite rightly focus on outreach and supporting students, and I think there is a gap in provision of training. Perhaps the MATs and wider trusts have a more joined up approach to this, but I cannot comment on that, as I’ve not got much experience with it!

So if you have been involved in UCAS and university support this term, I salute you. Yours is a vital part of student ambition and aspiration, and it may not be glamorous but it’s critical. I hope you have enjoyed it, and I hope it has been valuable to you. And, in some distant unknowable time, or results day, whichever is sooner, I hope it all pays off exactly how you and your students deserve it to!